GUGGENHEIM-HERMITAGE MUSEUM AND GUGGENHEIM LAS VEGAS MUSEUM Las Vegas, Nevada
CLIENTS The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The State Hermitage Museum, The Venetian Casino and Resort
PROGRAM Masterpiece gallery and temporary exhibition space
AREA 750 m² (8,000 sf) and 6,000 m² (64,000 sf)
CONSTRUCTION COST $5 million and $27 million
STATUS Commenced 2000; completed 2001
DESIGN ARCHITECT OMA
KEY PERSONNEL Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (Partner-in-Charge), with Christian
o allow for rapid reconfiguration in a limited space, a series of monolithic pivoting walls was developed. The walls attach to existing columns within the gallery and cantilever out from large collars fitted with ball-bearings, allowing for easy rotation by a couple of people.
In 2001, Las Vegas became the latest site in the Guggenheim Museum Network’s quest to define the “Museum of the 21st Century.” Topped only by New York City as an American tourist destination, Las Vegas copes with 35 million visitors annually. It was therefore deemed the ideal context in which to experiment with bringing high art to the masses. Within a single year, we were asked to design and build two museums—a small masterpiece gallery and large temporary exhibition space—inside the Venetian Casino and Resort.
The client’s most important demands concerned scale, practicality, and elasticity. The hangar-like exhibition space has a 21-meter ceiling and features a massive skylight and a functioning industrial crane. The floor of the ground level is flexible and may be opened to reveal a trench that drops down to lower-level galleries and spans the length of the exhibition space.
Seattle Central Library
SEATTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY Seattle, Washington
CLIENT Seattle Public Library PROGRAM Central library for Seattle’s 28-branch library system, including 33,700 m² of hq, reading room, book spiral, mixing chamber, meeting platform, living room, staff floor, children’s collection, and auditorium, and 4,600 m² of parking AREA 38,300 m² (412,000 sf) PROJECT COST $169.2 million STATUS Commenced 1999; completed 2004 ARCHITECT OMA | LMN
Each platform is a programmatic cluster that is architecturally defined and equipped for maximum, dedicated performance. Because each platform is designed for a unique purpose, their size, flexibility, circulation, palette, structure, and MEP vary.
The spaces in between the platforms function as trading floors where librarians inform and stimulate, where the interface between the different platforms is organized—spaces for work, interaction, and play.
The problem of traditional library organization is flatness. Departments are organized according to floor plates. Each floor is discreet; the unpredictable fits of growth and contraction in certain sections are, theoretically, contained within a single floor.
In 1920, the Seattle Public Library had no classification for Computer Science; by 1990 the section had exploded. As collections unpredictably swell, materials are dissociated from their categories. Excess materials are put in the basement, moved to off-site storage, or become squatters of another, totally unrelated department.
The Book Spiral implies a reclamation of the much-compromised Dewey Decimal System. By arranging the collection in a continuous ribbon—running from 000 to 999—the subjects form a
The Seattle Central Library redefines the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store where all potent forms of media—old and new—are presented equally and legibly. In an age where information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of all media and, more importantly, the curatorship of their content that will make the library vital.
Vakko Fashion Center
VAKKO FASHION CENTER Istanbul, Turkey CLIENTS Vakko and Power Media PROGRAM Headquarters for a Turkish fashion house—including offices, showrooms, conference rooms, auditorium, museum, and dining hall—as well as the television studios, radio production facilities, and screening rooms of its media sister-company AREA 5,400 m² (58,000 sf) and 3,700 m² (40,000 sf) COST Confidential STATUS Completed 2010 ARCHITECT REX
Meanwhile, the upper floor of the skeleton’s subterranean parking houses Power Media’s television and radio studios, which require acoustic damping and light control.
To this end, REX and its engineers devised steel boxes that could be assembled in myriad configurations while retaining the Showcase’s structural self-sufficiency
Famous works
Guggeenheim Las Vegas
GUGGENHEIM-HERMITAGE MUSEUM AND GUGGENHEIM LAS VEGAS MUSEUM
Las Vegas, Nevada
CLIENTS The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The State Hermitage Museum, The Venetian Casino and Resort
PROGRAM Masterpiece gallery and temporary exhibition space
AREA 750 m² (8,000 sf) and 6,000 m² (64,000 sf)
CONSTRUCTION COST $5 million and $27 million
STATUS Commenced 2000; completed 2001
DESIGN ARCHITECT OMA
KEY PERSONNEL Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (Partner-in-Charge), with Christian
o allow for rapid reconfiguration in a limited space, a series of monolithic pivoting walls was developed. The walls attach to existing columns within the gallery and cantilever out from large collars fitted with ball-bearings, allowing for easy rotation by a couple of people.
In 2001, Las Vegas became the latest site in the Guggenheim Museum Network’s quest to define the “Museum of the 21st Century.” Topped only by New York City as an American tourist destination, Las Vegas copes with 35 million visitors annually. It was therefore deemed the ideal context in which to experiment with bringing high art to the masses. Within a single year, we were asked to design and build two museums—a small masterpiece gallery and large temporary exhibition space—inside the Venetian Casino and Resort.
The client’s most important demands concerned scale, practicality, and elasticity. The hangar-like exhibition space has a 21-meter ceiling and features a massive skylight and a functioning industrial crane. The floor of the ground level is flexible and may be opened to reveal a trench that drops down to lower-level galleries and spans the length of the exhibition space.
Seattle Central Library
SEATTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY
Seattle, Washington
CLIENT Seattle Public Library
PROGRAM Central library for Seattle’s 28-branch library system, including 33,700 m² of hq, reading room, book spiral, mixing chamber, meeting platform, living room, staff floor, children’s collection, and auditorium, and 4,600 m² of parking
AREA 38,300 m² (412,000 sf)
PROJECT COST $169.2 million
STATUS Commenced 1999; completed 2004
ARCHITECT OMA | LMN
Each platform is a programmatic cluster that is architecturally defined and equipped for maximum, dedicated performance. Because each platform is designed for a unique purpose, their size, flexibility, circulation, palette, structure, and MEP vary.
The spaces in between the platforms function as trading floors where librarians inform and stimulate, where the interface between the different platforms is organized—spaces for work, interaction, and play.
The problem of traditional library organization is flatness. Departments are organized according to floor plates. Each floor is discreet; the unpredictable fits of growth and contraction in certain sections are, theoretically, contained within a single floor.
In 1920, the Seattle Public Library had no classification for Computer Science; by 1990 the section had exploded. As collections unpredictably swell, materials are dissociated from their categories. Excess materials are put in the basement, moved to off-site storage, or become squatters of another, totally unrelated department.
The Book Spiral implies a reclamation of the much-compromised Dewey Decimal System. By arranging the collection in a continuous ribbon—running from 000 to 999—the subjects form a
The Seattle Central Library redefines the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store where all potent forms of media—old and new—are presented equally and legibly. In an age where information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of all media and, more importantly, the curatorship of their content that will make the library vital.
Vakko Fashion Center
VAKKO FASHION CENTER Istanbul, Turkey CLIENTS Vakko and Power Media PROGRAM Headquarters for a Turkish fashion house—including offices, showrooms, conference rooms, auditorium, museum, and dining hall—as well as the television studios, radio production facilities, and screening rooms of its media sister-company AREA 5,400 m² (58,000 sf) and 3,700 m² (40,000 sf) COST Confidential STATUS Completed 2010 ARCHITECT REX
Meanwhile, the upper floor of the skeleton’s subterranean parking houses Power Media’s television and radio studios, which require acoustic damping and light control.
To this end, REX and its engineers devised steel boxes that could be assembled in myriad configurations while retaining the Showcase’s structural self-sufficiency